Montreal's historic Le 456 Sauna closes after 33 years

Montreal’s famed Le 456 Sauna downtown – open around-the-clock since 1979, with some of their regular customers dating back over a quarter-century – has closed its doors to make way for a new 14-storey condominium building. The historic bathhouse was among the city’s oldest gay-run businesses. But Le 456 owner Dany Rathé says a new-and-improved bathhouse (also located at 456 de la Gauchetiere West) will be incorporated into the new building and will, according to the new 456 website, will be called “Le 456 Sauna Industriel.”

“The sauna was still very nice inside,” says Le 456 Sauna owner Dany Rathé. The bathhouse (called “saunas” in Quebec) boasted a pool, gym, steamroom and jacuzzi with 74 smaller rooms and 7 double rooms over two floors. It could accommodate 200 customers at any given time.

“But the building was very old and if there were [only] 50 customers, the place [was so big] it looked empty,” Rathé says. “So I’m very happy that it will be rebuilt. It’ll be better.”

The gay historical importance of the building – built in 1836 – predates Le 456 Sauna, however. The building’s first bathhouse, The Neptune Sauna, was opened in 1973 by Andre Laflamme and Lorne Holiday. At the time Laflamme and Holiday also owned the Crescent Street-located Aquarius Sauna which was firebombed in April 1975 when Montreal’s Gay Village was still downtown, before the exodus east after the 1976 Montreal summer Olympic games. Three customers died in the Aquarius fire, and two of them — found burnt to a crisp by the second-floor fire exit — were buried in paupers’ graves because their corpses were never identified or claimed by their families.

The Neptune was then raided by Montreal police on May 14, 1976. “They yanked off people’s towels and threw everybody together and took pictures and charged them all with being in a common bawdy house,” says Henri Labelle who was working as the cashier at the Neptune that night (Labelle is now a lecturer at Concordia University).

“There was a former mayor’s son there, a government minister, a secretary to the Catholic Archbishop and a couple of cops, but they were ushered out the back door while everyone else was thrown in paddy wagons.”

Eighty-nine patrons were arrested and police confiscated The Neptune’s 7,000-name membership list. “The police were mad about collecting people’s names during that period,” says author and award-winning historian Ross Higgins, who also co-founded the Quebec Gay Archives. “I was part of the group that called for a meeting at the student centre at McGill University after The Neptune raid. There were over 100 people there and they were very angry. That was the beginning of modern gay organizing in Montreal and lead to the creation the Association pour les droits des gais du Québec (ADGQ).”

The Neptune later closed and The Continental Sauna opened in 1977. “But it was short-lived,” Higgins says.

Le 456 Sauna then opened in 1979.

Current owner Dany Rathé says he began working as a staffer at Le 456 Sauna 25 years ago before buying the business in 2006. Nothing from the current bathhouse will be saved, including the third-floor walls spray-painted my iconic Montreal artist Zilon. “I’m the person who commissioned Zilon’s work in 1993,” Rathé says.

But building owner Federico Bizzotto has invited Rathé to open a new sauna – to be called Le 456 Sauna Industriel – in Bizzotto’s new 14-storey U Building on the same site.

“I approached Dany to run Le 456 [in the new building] because it has a cultural value, serves a niche market and is part of the heritage of that building,” Bizzotto says.

Higgins says, “That building is significant because of The Neptune police raid and as a symbol of the rise of the gay entrepreneur coming of age in 1970s Montreal.”

Interestingly, two buildings over, developers are tearing down the 494 de la Gauchetiere West building at the corner of Beaver Hall Hill that was home to Montreal’s infamous Sex Garage police raid on the night of July 14, 1990 – one that many consider to be Montreal’s Stonewall. That building is now making way for a new 35-storey condo tower called The Altoria.

Bizzotto says his U Building – which will feature the new Le 456 Sauna Industriel – is “based on an award-winning design that we hope to open my mid-2013. And we’ve decided to give the new 456 Sauna a separate address and entrance.”

Read the only published history (which I wrote for Xtra)of Montreal’s historic July 1990 Sex Garage police raid by clicking here.

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